The Pearl River delta is one of the hottest economic spots in China, where Deng's economic reforms took root. It is also one of the most fertile areas in China and has one of the largest population densities in the world. However, it is not in fact a natural river delta, but was created entirely by human hands from open ocean 1000-500 years ago.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/9.2/marks.html
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/9.2/marks.html
AT FIRST GLANCE, one might think that this image is of a beating heart (lower right) covered by a dense network of arteries and veins. In truth this is a satellite photo of the Pearl River delta and estuary in south China.1 To get your bearings, Hong Kong is the peninsula at the lower right, the city of Guangzhou is just left of center at the apex of the central artery (the Pearl River), and Macao (not on the image) is across the bay from Hong Kong. The image was captured on 24 December 1975 by the first Landsat satellite. Using remote sensing equipment with a ground resolution of forty meters, Landsat 1 took over 300,000 images. For south China, which receives about eighty inches of rain annually, many of those images are of clouds. Fortunately, the summer monsoon season gives way to clearer, drier weather in the winter, and hence to this image. 1
The metaphor of it being a heart is not far off the mark. Today, more than 35 million people live in those ten thousand square kilometers, making it among the most densely inhabited places on Earth. Moreover, since the economic reforms of the early 1980s, the Pearl River delta region has been the heart pumping China's emergence as a global economic power. As noted recently by the Los Angeles Times, "if it was an independent country, the greater delta [area] ... would be East Asia's fourth-largest economy and its second-largest exporter. Its sprawling, gray cities ... collectively draw foreign investment at an astounding rate of nearly $2 billion a month."2 2
Indeed, the rapid industrialization of the Pearl River delta region has put tremendous strains on the environment, with increasing signs of the collapse of some ecosystems. At dusk, the sun sinks, blood red, through the haze of industrial smoke. For centuries a center of silk manufacturing, in the 1990s the mulberry trees and silk worms in the dense system of waterways to the south of Guangzhou were replaced by fruit trees, not because there was greater demand for fruit, but because the air quality was so bad the silk worms died. Driving on two-lane roads at night, headlights rarely flash the eyes of any animals, and there is virtually no road kill, a rough indicator of wildlife populations.
Given the speed of the industrialization and the extent of the environmental degradation now afflicting the delta, environmental historians might suspect a familiar, declensionist storyline: Industry and human activity despoil yet another subtropical forest region. But that's not what happened. Even those who know a little Chinese history might suppose that the vast population increase of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led Chinese to deforest the delta, leaving a vast farmland upon which later factories could be built. But that too is not what happened. 4
When I first began researching the environmental history of south China, I had assumed that the Pearl River delta was a natural phenomenon that had been lying there awaiting human exploitation, in particular land clearance for settled Chinese agriculture.3 What I discovered instead is that the Pearl River delta is very much a human creation. 5
Two thousand years ago, the Pearl River delta did not exist. Almost the entire area in the lower center of the Landsat photo where there are now waterways was open water. Chinese were just beginning to enter the region, and their small settlement of Nanhai (which ultimately became the city of Guangzhou) was not in a delta, but rather was a port overlooking an estuary dotted with islands. Indeed, for most of the first millennium CE, there was not much increase in the size of the alluvial delta. But starting around 1000 CE, and then accelerating rapidly during the fourteenth century, the delta took shape, nearly reaching its current size (as in the Landsat image) by the early nineteenth century. What accounts for the timing and increased rate of creation of the Pearl River delta? 6
When Chinese first went south from the cradle of their civilization in the north, they encountered the lowland agricultural Tai people who had built their own state, and stateless highland people the Chinese called Zhuang. The first Chinese were in conquering armies sent by the great unifier of China, the First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shihuang Di, ca. 220 BCE). During the Han dynasty (ca. 200 BCE-200 CE), Chinese migrants occupied the higher land to the north of the Pearl River estuary, not just because the river valleys were already taken by the Tai, but also because of fear of malaria and other tropical diseases. Practicing various forms of slash-and-burn swidden agriculture, Chinese settlers cleared forests in the hills north of the Pearl River, increasing the silt content of the rivers flowing down toward the estuary. In the Landsat photo, the high silt load of the rivers can be seen in the blotchy gray areas: Those are all silt plumes spreading into the estuary. 7
But during the first millennium CE, the increased silt load from Chinese farming did not make it to the estuary, and hence did not create much of a delta. Instead, when the monsoonal rains came and filled the rivers with silt from the newly opened farmlands, the rivers overfilled their banks and filled the flood plains, with the silt enriching the lands tilled by the Tai. Increasingly, though, Chinese backed by the military power of their state began moving into the river valleys to farm, displacing the Tai. As they did so, they brought with them the techniques of water control and wet-rice agriculture pioneered to the north in the Yangzi River. During the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), Chinese constructed hundreds of miles of flood-control levees on the lower reaches of the West, North, and East rivers in order to make rice paddies (the West and North rivers are on the left of the Landsat photo; the East is on the right). Doing so not only brought Chinese land- and water-management practices to what was then still the exotic south, but also pinned the rivers into their courses, sending the silt-laden rivers into the Pearl River estuary, where the larger volume of alluvium settled out to begin forming the delta. But the story does not end there. 8
When the Mongols invaded China in the thirteenth century, and especially during the final conquest in the 1260s and 1270s, Chinese fled south in waves. With Mongol armies poised to enter south China, many of the Chinese in their path fled to the islands in the Pearl River estuary to hide. Once there, the settlers created rice paddies from the sandbars that had begun forming on the downstream side of the islands. Soon, the Chinese devised ways to hasten the deposition of additional silt, and fields literally began rising from the waters. Over the next few centuries, Chinese created tens of thousands of acres of highly productive agricultural land that they called shatan, or "sand flats." The dense network of arteries in the lower center of the photo originally had been the estuary dotted with islands. As the settlers filled the estuary with the new land, the arteries were left both as sources of water for irrigation and for transportation. 9
After the Mongols left and China once again was ruled by Chinese during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), population in the new Pearl River delta grew, agricultural productivity improved, and the region commercialized. With food supplies guaranteed by imports from upriver, Pearl River delta farmers turned first to fruit and then to sericulture. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Pearl River delta was among the most productive regions of China, supplying fish, vegetables, and rice to the growing city of Guangzhou, and silk for export to Europeans. 10
The Pearl River delta thus was not created by natural processes, and had not been simply waiting for Chinese to migrate from the north and reclaim it for agriculture. Rather, the creation of the Pearl River delta and its later emergence as the densely populated, agriculturally rich core of South China was a contingent, rather than naturally determined, historical outcome. And what appears from space as a "natural" feature of the landscape is actually a human creation. 11
That fact, of course, complicates our understanding of what industrialization there now is doing to the environment. Certainly it is not a story of the destruction of a "natural" environment. But neither is it just the latest in a long history of human alterations to the region. The difference, it seems to me, is that the Chinese who created the delta all those centuries ago, channeled (literally) natural processes. Those creating the factories and polluting the air and water now are not. And who are those people? In the end, it may well be you and me, for much of China's current $150 billion trade surplus with the United States comes from goods manufactured in the Pearl River delta. 12
Robert Marks is the Deihl Professor of History at Whittier College, and the author of The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Rowan & Littlefield, 2002), and Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998).
